It took a while for people to adjust to the idea of chatbots that seem to have minds of their own. The next leap into the unknown may involve trusting artificial intelligence to take over our computers, too.
Anthropic, a high-flying competitor to OpenAI, announced today that it has taught its AI model Claude to do a range of things on a computer, including search the web, open applications, and input text using the mouse and keyboard.
“I think we’re going to enter into a new era where a model can use all of the tools that you use as a person to get tasks done,” says Jared Kaplan, chief science officer at Anthropic and an associate professor at Johns Hopkins University.
Kaplan showed WIRED a prerecorded demo in which an “agentic”—or tool-using—version of Claude had been asked to help plan an outing to see the sunrise at the Golden Gate Bridge with a friend. In response to the prompt, Claude opened the Chrome web browser, looked up relevant information on Google, including the ideal viewing spot and the optimal time to be there, then used a calendar app to create an event to share with a friend. (It did not include further instructions, such as what route to take to get there in the least amount of time.)
In a second demo, Claude was asked to build a simple website to promote itself. In a surreal moment, the model inputted a text prompt into its own web interface to generate the necessary code. It then used Visual Studio Code, a popular code editor developed by Microsoft, to write a simple website, and opened a text terminal to spin up a simple web server to test the site. The website offered a decent, 1990s-themed landing page for the AI model. When the user asked it to fix a problem on the resulting website, the model returned to the editor, identified the offending snippet of code, and deleted it.
Mike Krieger, chief product officer at Anthropic, says the company hopes that so-called AI agents will automate routine office tasks and free people up to be more productive in other areas. “What would you do if you got rid of a bunch of hours of copy and pasting or whatever you end up doing?” he says. “I’d go and play more guitar.”
Anthropic is making the agentic abilities available through its application programming interface (API) for its most powerful multimodal large language model, Claude 3.5 Sonnet, from today. The company also announced a new and improved version of a smaller model, Claude 3.5 Haiku, today.
Content retrieved from: https://www.wired.com/story/anthropic-ai-agent/.
